Walsall-based Stedek has built its business on a set of key underlying principles, which have helped it to maximise opportunities in key market sectors.
The trade fabricator also expects a similar commitment from its key suppliers, which is why it partnered with aluplast in the manufacture and supply of flush casement windows.
“We were asked ‘what does “Stedek” mean?’ and we matched it with trust, honesty, integrity and reliability,” Stedek’s sales director Richard Hammond said. “And if I can get that message across to our customers, promise those core values, and then deliver on them, they become real, not just disposable words.”
As the demand for home improvement products increased post pandemic, reflecting the changing economic conditions, these core values supported Stedek’s role as a key supplier of high value niche products.
“Over the past two years, we’ve seen flush casements emerge and become prominent in both the new and replacement windows markets here in the UK,” he said. “Instead of standard white casements, homeowners want more premium products, a wider range of colours and an altogether different aesthetic. Being able to offer those higher end products means meeting increased consumer demand and growing the business.”
Stedek is one of the country’s most experienced manufacturers of flush casement windows, supplying them to the trade for more than five years. When aluplast introduced a high-quality flush casement option that suites with the Ideal 70 system, the trade fabricator jumped at the opportunities this offered.
aluplast’s flush meets the demands of the heritage sector, thanks to the narrowest sightlines on the market (58mm) and a range of 40 different finishes, including the next generation woodec and aludec foils.
The systems company has also invested significantly in its foil offer which allows it to maintain a strong supply of its most popular stock colours, with foiled product accounting for as much as 50% of total order volume.
“People almost never want a white window when it’s a flush casement, so having a supplier like aluplast that’s got a wide colour range available from stock, and a really strong commitment to lead times on special order colours, means that we can offer our customers really broad offering, which is key in the current climate,” Richard said.
“We’re also excited to be able to offer the new flush door from aluplast, which has just been tested, and will help us meet those demands where homeowners want a flush appearance across the whole façade.”
The flush door is fully PAS24-accredited in both single and double open-out configurations, and has a five-chamber design that can achieve U-values as low as 1.2W/m2K.
Both windows and doors are manufactured using ecotech, which maximises the amount of recycled content in a profile’s design, without affecting performance or the finish of the profile.
Ecotech uses a ‘dual-extrusion’ process that uses two extruders in parallel to push recycled and virgin polymer through the profile die at the same time. This ensures that recycled material is only used in the internal webbing, remaining isolated from the external wall, with virgin polymer used to provide the external wall of the profile.
“Like Stedek, aluplast is a family run business with similar values to our own – sustainability, quality, reliability, and dependability,” Richard said. “We are not a huge business, and we don’t have a big warehouse to store lots of profile. So, we rely on our suppliers to be dependable, and to deliver on time and in full. This allows us to dedicate more floorspace to producing quality frames and to deliver on time and in full to our customers.”
